How Gross Is Your Tap Water? ‘Bottlemania’ Has an Answer

Kaitlin Bell says that Elizabeth Royte’s new Bottlemania (Bloomsbury, 242 pp., $24.99), an indictment of the bottled-water industry, does more than fault some of the major players in the field, including Coke, Pepsi and Nestlé: “It also provides some devastating revelations about the quality of America’s public water supply. In stomach-churning detail, Ms. Royte describes how arsenic, rocket fuel, antidepressants, birth-defect–inducing herbicides and even potentially carcinogenic byproducts of the disinfection process all make it into municipal water supplies.” Read her full review in the May 18 New York Observer here:www.observer.com/2008/raise-glass-eau-de-bloomberg.

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This is interesting because I’d recently read that Pepsi’s Aquafina and Coca-Cola Co’s Dasani are both just tap water. Our tap water isn’t the greatest (lots of calcium carbonate and some salt and sulfur), but I hate the landfill waste produced by bottled water, and I don’t drink much of it. We do buy large containers of water to use for coffee and tea, and we’re thinking of adding an additional filter to the fridge (where we get the cold water and ice). I water our vegetable garden with rainwater (which is good here) collected in rain barrels.

If those brands are tap water, that could be part of the problem — either because people are being charged for something they could get for free or, God forbid, because the tap water has one of those awful substances like rocket fuel in it.

The filter on your refrigerator might not be a bad idea. I just read that a major hospital has just decided to ban the use of tap water for just about anything, including the brushing of teeth.